Western women have been getting enlightened, tightened, and cleansed on a massive scale for some time now. It's a movement, all right, but are we actually getting anywhere?

A few years ago, midway through a beautiful spring, my grandmother was 98 and dying, and she was not going quietly. Since before I could remember, she'd patiently sat with me playing word games, telling me stories, or counting out raisins for my oatmeal. She'd followed my report cards, batting averages, boyfriends, and bosses with unflagging interest.

Now, when I could, I made the three-hour trip to the nursing home where she lived to bring her lox sandwiches the way she liked them—bagel toasted, only a thin layer of cream cheese—and to read her the paper. Being a few months shy of 99 and still having your marbles is a lonely condition; you've outlived all your friends, your entire family of origin, and also your new friends, the ones you made when you first got old. It's uncharted territory, a kind of starting over. I read my grandmother the poems of writers also in their late nineties—Stanley Kunitz and Czeslaw Milosz—to try to give her a sense of community. Milosz: "As late as the approach of my ninetieth year,/ I felt a door opening in me and I entered/ the clarity of early morning./ One after another my former lives were departing,/ like ships, together with their sorrow."

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One day while planning a visit to her, I noticed on Google Maps that the Kripalu Center for Yoga & Health was within walking distance of the nursing home—just .8 miles away. Its cheapest room cost more than a hotel, but it included three meals a day and lots of yoga. Set in the hills of the Berkshires, the Kripalu Center was once a seminary for Jesuits, but in the 1980s followers of yoga guru Amrit Desai bought the building and turned it into an ashram, or spiritual retreat. About a decade later, after Desai left amid scandal, Kripalu was revamped as a secular nonprofit and today is the largest residential yoga center in America.

As a kid, I'd attended a day camp a few miles from Kripalu at a site that was home to a community of Catholic priests, brothers, and nuns called the Marians. Kripalu's facility was built during the same era, and its cinder-block building felt familiar. I'd taken yoga classes through the years and I imagined that Kripalu, like the Marian campus, would be a meditative place to process what was happening with my grandmother and help cushion the heartbreak.

I signed up for the generic "R&R retreat," though the center also has more structured offerings, ranging from "How to Read the Akashic Records: Accessing the Archive of the Soul and Its Journey" to "A Women's Spiritual Retreat: Learning How to Love Ourselves." The Jesuits' altars were still in place at Kripalu, but the crosses had been replaced by Hindu deities. Earth-tone pillows and IKEA Poäng recliners had been judiciously scattered around the spare building. Women were everywhere: in the cafeteria clutching their "Buddha bowls" (actually just ordinary bowls); on their hands and knees, hips wiggling in Yoga Dance, which "combined yoga, dance, and chakras"; and toned and tattooed in the hot tub. Posted in the lobby was a flyer meekly titled Men might like, listing activities that combined yoga with, literally, something men might like: kayaking, golf, harmonica playing….

The options for those of us on the R&R track were yoga, drum circles, spiritual talks, and a "healing arts sampler," in which we sat atop meditation cushions as healers addressed us, borderline-infomercial style, about extra services we could tack on during our stay. For two or three dollars a minute, we could pay to have our bodies brushed and rubbed with healing oils, or touched using a combination of light acupressure and "angelic energy," or have our skulls massaged to "unblock cerebral spinal fluid." We could learn about what foods to eat for our ayurvedic profile or blood type, and what to avoid to prevent inflammation. The healers drew on a variety of non-Western traditions, some of which made competing claims and few that would have been practiced side by side in their countries of origin. In class, I learned that fruit was bad if you were macrobiotic, but maybe good if you needed antioxidants. Your intestines might be full of "toxins," but that could be remedied by a few days of juice fasting, which would also confer numerous spiritual benefits. (I tiptoed every evening around a large stall in the shared bathroom that bore a sign announcing it was reserved for juice fasters, hoping that "colon detoxification" would not occur while I was brushing my teeth.)

A common thread through these diverse practices was that they blamed vague "energetic" imbalances for physical problems such as ear infections or disease. The relentless focus on the body apparently did not agree with mine because about a day into my retreat, I became memorably sick to my stomach—possibly from hitting the cafeteria kale a little too hard. As my colon "detoxified," I realized that in a center with three floors of healing arts, there was probably not a single bottle of Imodium.

For thousands of years, yoga developed within Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Sikhism; it was one piece of a strict religious practice that included study, prayer, and sometimes celibacy. The $10.3 billion a year industry that is yoga in America plucks vocabulary, ideas, and aesthetics from these faiths but with little of the cultural context or spiritual discipline. Hence "Yoga Business Coaching" or Ahnu's Karma "yoga-chic shoes" (made, without apparent irony, of leather). Yoga pants—those butt-enhancing spandex numbers with a wide waistband—are named after Hindu demigods or embossed with a Sanskrit emblem. But their truest connection to the subcontinent is that they are often sewn in factories there. In yoga classes, practitioners may devotionally bow to a Hindu icon and chant "om namah shivaya," but rarely do they mean, "I bow to the Lord Shiva," which is how the words translate.

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"Yoga is more of a strand of American new age culture than an importation of Hinduism," says Karlyn Crowley, an associate professor of English and director of the Women's and Gender Studies Program at St. Norbert College. Crowley, who in 2011 published Feminism's New Age: Gender, Appropriation, and the Afterlife of Essentialism, considers new age culture—which, despite all the 1970s associations with Reiki and crystals, has roots in America as far back as the nineteenth century—to be a women's movement.

Indeed, a 2012 study commissioned by Yoga Journal found that 82 percent of the 20.4 million U.S. yoga practitioners are women. In popular memoirs (Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love; Claire Dederer's Poser), yoga is the go-to spiritual practice for a searching American woman. Women disproportionately flock to yoga retreats and dominate the pages of yoga magazines and the Lululemon, Athleta, and Gaiam catalogs. As Crowley points out, "The yoga body is Gwyneth Paltrow's body—the elongated feminine form. That is still the way yoga is represented in mainstream media."

In yoga class at Kripalu, the teachers spoke about the Buddhist idea of nonattachment, about the importance of being in the present moment, not at the mercy of one's desires for the future or regrets about the past. They encouraged us to quiet the mind and stop the endless flow of thoughts. The center was building an annex with nicer rooms, and during one class loud construction equipment grated unpleasantly over the yoga teacher's voice. He sat erect on a cushion in front of us and suggested casually: "When you hear the noise, try to notice: Are you attached to it in one way or another?" The teacher encouraged us to let go of value judgments on the noise and just witness our emotions as they came in, then let them go. Of the many different cultural practices being thrown around Kripalu, this idea of letting go and striving for equanimity was the most dominant. It set a tone in class and out that everyone strived to match. I recognized it from my previous dabbling in hour-long yoga classes but had never given it a thought.

But now I was in a heightened state of attachment—grief for my grandmother, who was herself ferociously attached to life—and so the idea stood out more for me. And I was not so sure attachment was something to avoid.

I noticed that no one at Kripalu ever answered a question directly. I asked a woman in an iridescent sari and neon turban if the room she stood outside was the welcome session. She smiled Yoda-ishly and said, "You would know if you were supposed to be here."

"Did I take your seat?" I asked a woman in the dining hall who had glanced at me with a touch of annoyance.

"Oh, it's really all good," she said quickly.

It turns out that Google Maps sometimes inaccurately represents distances on hilly roads like those between Kripalu and my grandmother's nursing home, and Kripalu was in fact more than .8 miles away. But luckily, the shuttle that ferried visitors from the Peter Pan bus stop to the retreat center drove right past the nursing home.

So I went to visit my grandmother on the bus schedule, traveling from Kripalu, where the body was seen as so full of redemptive possibility, its maladies potentially cured with diet or mind-set, to the nursing home, where the body was a holy ruin, hoisted and moved by others, parked in a wheelchair in the hallway. It was jarring too, to switch from the cool vagueness of yogaspeak to the directness of my grandmother, a woman brimming with judgments, favorites, passions, and jealousies. Dick Cheney? An idiot. Sailboats at Gloucester? More beautiful than you can imagine. The scrod entree? Way too dry.

My grandmother had polio as a baby, in 1911. The disease withered a leg and lingered in her body, taking out other muscles decades later. Doctors told her parents that she would be wheelchair bound and die by age 30, but instead she walked. She wore a 13-pound steel brace on the bum leg and propelled herself forward with the other. Once, the brace's lock slipped; she crumpled to the floor and had to crawl to a phone. Her forearm muscles bulged like a body builder's from pulling her 4'11" frame up stairs or into a rowboat. She was vital, with a crown of thick black hair, bifurcated with a single natural white streak, and she cared about her appearance, tailoring her clothes to account for the slightly crooked way she held her body.

Everyone assumed she would never marry, and she once recounted ruefully how the family doctor had told her mother that she had broad shoulders because "that was the only thing he could find to compliment." But my grandmother avoided the fate of the Pitiful Cripple, pictured on March of Dimes ads at the time—she married, had a child, and traveled. She stole her independence by force of will, and she loved her life. In her early nineties, when walking down the long hallway to the dining room at her senior residence took nearly an hour, she would still put on lipstick and jewelry to embark on the journey. She would never let herself be pushed in a wheelchair.

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But she had a series of mini strokes at age 95, lost the use of more muscles, and her body finally gave out. All her life she had a way of getting up from a chair on her one good leg. Now rehab therapists told her she needed to learn a new way to move, and she just couldn't.

So she ended up in a nursing home, confined to bed. She did not try to make the best of her new situation, or even accept it. She asked for her TV to be shut off and the artwork taken down, and she managed to avoid having a roommate (the nursing home caved to her will rather than try to argue with her). She hatched several escape plans, but when she saw there was truly no way out, she decided to starve herself. She managed to live for several months barely eating or drinking, as her body became skeletal.

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Early in this process I arrived at her door from Kripalu, thrumming with worry and sorrow about what I might encounter. I called out fake-cheerily, "Hi, Grandma!" She shook her head.

"You shouldn't have come! It's terrible here. Where are you staying?" When I told her, she was particularly irate. "Hide your credit cards from Mr. Kripalu—he will charge you!"

After a day's coaching about letting go of preferences, I found it refreshing to hear my grandmother complain that the bread on the sandwich I brought her was too thick; it would have been better toasted! She refused to leave her room because it was depressing to see all the people who were, she said, "out of their minds."

Being with her made it clear that the yoga philosophy I had been swimming in was true: If my grandmother's sense of self were less tied to external things like walking or doing what she wanted when she wanted, if she had stopped trying to control her circumstances and surrendered to them, if she could have gotten some distance from her experience, she would have suffered less.

But if she had been someone who accepted things as they were, she might not have fought to walk. And in a world that was not wheelchair accessible, she might not have had a life.

At Kripalu, I paid for my shuttle rides—$7 each way for a two-mile trip. (Grandma was right, Mr. Kripalu did charge me.) The man at the front desk, sanguine and goateed, reviewed my bill and pursed his lips, lightly concerned. "It looks like you're taking the shuttle several times a day." I explained the issue with Google Maps and that my grandmother was dying.

He gave me the Yoda nod and said, "The shuttle is really only to be used for arriving and departing at the center. We feel trips into town can compromise the retreat experience."

The healing and compassion spoken about at the yoga center were to take place within the self; visiting the sick was actually sort of against the rules. Healing oneself can lead a person to try to heal the broader world, and I also think American yoga culture in general, and the Kripalu Center specifically, has probably helped a lot of people. But I wonder why as women we have chosen a practice that is so profoundly inward- facing—and whether it ultimately serves us. Building an inner sense of empowerment is not the same as acquiring power in the world. When I picture all the American women at any given moment doing yoga in suburban strip-mall studios, high-end retreats, at the Y—donning body-skimming clothes, bowing their heads, and searching for quiet within—I wonder what would happen if we focused more on one another instead. What if rather than talking ourselves into letting go, we talked one another into getting more engaged?

In yoga culture, the idea of nonattachment is too often simplified to remaining smiling and nonjudgmental. I recently stumbled upon a 2011 blog post by a Bikram yoga teacher who was attending teacher training with the guru of the movement, Bikram Choudhury. Earlier this year, Choudhury was sued for sexual harassment by a former student. In the blog post, written before the suit was filed, the teacher wrestles with the rape jokes she'd heard Choudhury make: "I'm trying not to judge Bikram for what he said, and for joking about rape and…I'm trying not to judge all the people who were laughing."

Serious practitioners of nonattachment have ways, within that framework, to employ what they call "discernment" and to be engaged in the external world even, paradoxically, as it is held in their minds at some distance. But that approach doesn't seem to really seep into yoga culture.

My grandmother said what she thought, judged analytically, and never let go of her anger or her desire, even at the end. The memory of her death, in May 2010, can still sear me with pain, and I am not looking for serene detachment from that pain. Her life taught me that to be invested, without distance, can also be a spiritual practice, a way of loving the world.